PG Historical: Sub Districts

[oldboots]

At the risk of opening up any more cans of worms I'll chuck in a few thoughts.

One of the main functions of the address system has to be to promote ease of searching. I want to be able to find reviews of pubs within a given area so I want the addresses to be accurate, consistent and reflect where the pubs physically are, e.g. for a pub crawl. Obviously accuracy and consistency are down to the quality of the information supplied, one man's Brixton is another man's East Clapham. I don't know the constraints on your database but it looks like there are only a limited number of fields for addresses:- street, town, post code and post town if it's a sub district, one extra for an area within a town would be useful. For example if I were planning a pub crawl of the Fratton area of Portsmouth but don't know the post code I can't search on FRATTON but only PORTSMOUTH, I then need to check out the maps or addresses to find their proximity, the local pubs list is a good in this respect but only once you've found a starting point. All cities and most towns have distinct areas but on the down side in the villages I know, you only need the pub and village name, nearest post town is normally useful but as they are there for the convenience of the Post Office they sometimes can be counter productive.

[Conrad]

We have the 1 extra field you are talking about, although it is not taken into account in the search. So we have:
pubname
pubstreet
region
sub-district
postal town
postcode

The name, sub-district, town and postcode are incorporated in our search, that can be changed easily and indeed extra fields can be added easily.

To do that sort of thing though it has to improve the quality of the site, so if we added regions to the search, that would be a lot more false positives to be returned. We could create a advanced search feature, but again that really just adds complication to the site which people then have to be expected to learn.

I think making a region more prominent will only complicate things myself, you could search on it and it might show a list of the pubs there (and anything else that matched the term), but the region itself would not have a page and would not show up anywhere else except on the pubs page.

As to finding a starting point in the region, we do incorporate that into the search, if you search on a region, so for instance Bishopston Bristol we check with Google Maps if it has that location, if it does, we bring up that location and show the local pubs in that map frame. I don't see us improving on the Google quality of result.

Hope that explains my thinking on that one. As ever feel free to keep them coming or correct me, I would rather we try and keep the site as usable as possible.

As a slight addendum, the map points are contained using a longitude and latitude, which we initially guess based purely on postcode, which is why our system is so zealous about needing a postcode. So it is really important that is as correct as possible, and so helpful where the users then make these map points correct.

[Farway]

Oh, I assumed "region" was like South East, West Country, Ooop North etc

maybe rename to district ? What is sub district then?

Confused of Lovedean

[Conrad]

Oh, I assumed "region" was like South East, West Country, Ooop North etc

maybe rename to district ? What is sub district then?

Confused of Lovedean

When I used the following I was just trying to be brief:

pubname
pubstreet
region
sub-district
postal town
postcode.

In terms of how a pub exists on our system it has information for:

• pubname - The name of the pub
• pubstreet - A street address for the pub; sometimes this will contain more information like (some hall, some street)
• region (district) - The region within it's town/sub-district, so taking an earlier example this is where we would put Fratton which if I understand correctly is a district of Portsmouth, but not its own town, hamlet, village, etc.
• sub-district - A town, hamlet, village, etc covered by a postal town, but not a district of the town
• postal town - The recognised postal town of the pub, usually dictated by postcode
• county - County of the pub, currently dictated by sub-district (I think, would need to double check)
• postcode - postcode of the pub
• longitude - longitude of the pub
• latitude - latitude of the pub

Sorry I can see how that would have been confusing , I wrote it in a rush and didn't give much thought to the language, it was meant more as an indicator of what information we keep about individual pubs, I actually forgot to include county on the original as well

[oldboots]

I got what you meant by Region, Conrad and I take your point about false positives. I'm still groping my way round the site so I'll find the best ways to do things and use features in the fullness of time. I certainly don't have any major gripes with the way the site works otherwise I wouldn't be here

[Conrad]

Thats good, I think a lot of users of the site don't know 'how it works' and there are no instructions.

Whilst I will clearly be convinced it all works fantastically as I have written it, I do need reality checks from the users, it may be that we are doing it right and need to find ways to make things clearer, it may be that we just do have it wrong, so I am glad for all the input, it means I can communicate a little of how it works, and see what people aren't getting, or want added.

[Eddie86]

I quite like how it works. The only way I'd improve it would be to have a google map come up with the results on in. So when you search Hay on Wye, in the list you get the Hollybush, Baskerville Arms (and seven stars, by the way, isn't a pub anymore, just a bnb)

When you search for 'pubs in hay on wye' in google maps, you get a list of the pubs by the side of a map, marking each one with a letter.

If, rather than just a list, you could add this map, then it may help slightly. Personally I don't have a problem with a list, as I can start generic and work down.

[Conrad]

I think the way it works is brilliant, but I am biased . More realistically, of the pub sites I have seen, I think we have got the most usable one for finding pubs, and then looking round the nearby area.

I am not sure everyone uses it the way I had in mind when I built it, and I am aware it is frequently not intuitive. This is also an aspect of the site that has frustrated people who want it to be as accurate as possible, so I like the opportunity to explain why we did what we did, and hear if people can think of ways to make it clearer/better.

I marked the Seven Stars as closed.

In a search I wouldn't show the results on the map personally, as if you searched for the Red lion for example you would have results for the whole country. It is something I think would be more useful in an advanced search.

For the specific example of Hay-on-Wye, if you are in a town and click on the checkbox above the map that says 'Show map points' (don't try this with a big city unless you have a fast computer, or are using Chrome), then hover over a pubs name, the point should show up on the map. This feature will work when filtering pubs as well - allowing you to work with a subset. Remember to untick the box after you play with it as the setting is stored and may slow down your experience of the site.